Is this thing on?

Me, today, post-opthamologist visit

(tap, tap)

Hello?

(deep amplified echo rising up from the empty amphitheater)

I don't even know where to begin after a full year of silence.

(throat clearing... more awkward silence)

I have heard that the personal blog is dead. That no one reads these things anymore, that it's now ALL about facebook and twitter and social media modes that trip off my son's tongue, but I can't even...

(closes eyes... opens them)

I just want to tell some stories again.

<whispers> Can I do that?

(listening... no one says "no")

Ok, then...

It's not like I haven't written in a year.

I just haven't finished anything. Bits and fragments of posts sit in the "notes" section of my iPad, sandwiched between "to do" lists and homework schedules, insurance information and Bar Mitzvah plans.

My well is not run dry, but, rather, my bucket full of holes.

The winter has been bleak and March, that asshole month, did not fail to deliver its requisite punches (my late parents' anniversary, father's birthday, father's death date). Spring's blossoming flowers always invoke my mother, mixing the bitter with the sweet, and always now with the missing.

And, once again, the school-year's end looms. How did this year pass?

(With a crawl and a shamble and a speedy blur.  With two boys growing through three shoe sizes and nearly my height. With homework done and screen-minutes counted. With small victories and midnight pints of Ben & Jerrys.)

I think I may be back.

I'll let you know tomorrow.

(drops mike, goes to run Jacob's bath)


Also? Linking to Just Write because I love and have missed Heather.

This day

Mom, September 2012

I don't want the dawn to come, this day to begin.

I've been dreading it for a long time now: January 17th; the day, last year, that my mother died.

After today, it won't be "this year" that my mother died, but "last year" and I will be expected to be moving on, further from her.

And yet I find the more time has passed I seem to be tumbling further into her instead.  That final year of her life, I was so consumed with taking care of her, the frail, tentative, greatly diminished shadow my mother had become blotted out the vibrant, full-fleshed woman I had known and loved for years.

And now she has come back to me, memory after memory cascading though my dreams and waking thoughts. Though mixed and tumbled in, especially now, is the pain of those final days.

I would never, in a million years, have not been present for my mother's final moments, have let her die alone. And yet I can also say that I will never be the same, and not in a good way, for what I witnessed.

When her eyes flew open, unseeing except for her death come upon her; when she huffed and puffed and fought against the tide of her bursting, broken heart; this was seared into my brain. Her terror was terrifying, and will be with me always.  She did not go peaceful into that black night.

And then she was gone. And yet her body kept breathing. For a good five minutes still. As it wound down, I sat beside the waxy husk that had been my mother.  She had so clearly vacated the premises, but still I held her hand.  A body with the spirit fled is such a strange ghoulish thing, and yet there was also an odd comfort in sitting there.

I said goodbye to the body that had been my mother, watched it draw its last breath.

A year ago, today.

My mother is at peace.

Me, not so much so.

It's going to be a busy day today, Jake with no school, Ethan a mere half-day. There will be no time to mourn, to remember. I am a mother, my children need me. My eyes must search forward, not back.

And yes, tonight I will light a candle for my mother, let it burn through the night, encased safe in its shroud of glass; watch the flickering flame and its reflection in my heart, where her ember glows, always.

Goodnight, mom.

I love you.

One toe in

I dare not say "I'm back."

I don't even know where I've been. Writing in my head only again, for months, it's now so full of words I feared the explosion would take out a city block.

I feel fake and false sharing the days' small trials and triumphs, the trivia that pile up to assemble my life right now -- meals and homework and mountains of laundry and paperwork, attending to my children's mental and physical health -- when throughout flows this raging undercurrent of grief, still; ten months in.

Ten months.

More than enough time to gestate. And yet what do I have to show for it? This egg-like orb of nothingness that is the palpable absence of my mother, lodged under my chest; barely dissipated, still.

But I feel I cannot yet either wear my mourning on my writer's sleeve. Even though it suffuses everything subtly, the constant filter on my lens, as a topic it is gray wisps, ghostly vague, deadly dull.

I am well aware that to go on and on about missing my mother now will likely incite impassioned and compassionate admonitions to "look forward" and "move on" which will make me want to shank my well-meaning readers.  Never a good place to be.

And Thanksgiving coming up.

Last year with my mother and uncle. This year without.

I almost can't look at the photos, the longing they engender so great, I fear the molecules of the screens upon which the images burn will burst apart from my desire to hold those people again against my actual body and not just in my metaphoric heart.

Mom and Uncle Walter, Thanksgiving 2012

So here I am.

Once again with all these little stories I want to tell, yet they remain untold.

I know it's okay to smile and laugh in the middle of grief, and I do, every day. I know that my mother, of all people in the world, would want me to enjoy each and every moment with my children with all my soul. And I do. Every day.

I hope the floodgates open soon (yet can make no promises).

Until then, here, now, is my one toe back in the water.

It feels good.

Even if it is just a pool of tears.

Three funerals and a wedding

Last night I was at a friend's daughter's wedding, this morning at a friend's father's funeral. Three dear friends of mine lost parents this past week. You hit a certain age, and this is what the landscape starts to look like, the odds tipped towards death. I understand. (But I don't have to like it.)

Everyone who died was quite old, in their eighties and nineties.  They had rich, full lives, a long run, loving children and grandchildren by their side. These things are all good. These deaths are sad, not tragic. I know.

And yet, as a daughter who has lost a mother, I feel it all so keenly, the tears streaming down my cheeks for men and women I barely knew but whose daughters' hearts are currently breaking, as they now face the world motherless or fatherless for the rest of their lives.

Even the wedding was not free of minefields for me. It was a lovely affair, the bride in her 20s, our friends - her parents, so proud and happy. There was food and wine and dancing. After the hora, the DJ hit a nostalgia pocket, and when he dropped the needle on "In the mood" I suddenly fell to pieces, quietly sobbing on Danny's shoulder.

I had suddenly been transported back to my childhood,my mother teaching me to lindy-hop in the kitchen -- table pushed back against the egg-yolk yellow walls, kicking up our heels on the gray linoleum tiles, the cats looking on in bemusement from their warm perch atop the water-heater cabinet.

I loved and missed her so much right then.

It comes in waves like that, unexpected, never unprovoked, sometimes unwelcome, sometimes a gift. They are entwined, like that -- the loving and the missing.

And for now, I'll take it, since its all I've got.

Birthdays come and birthdays go

This morning it was just me and Jacob, his brother away still, at camp; his father off at a comic convention in Chicago.  When he woke up at the ungodly hour of 6:30, I plopped down next him on the sofa. "So is there anything you want to say to me this morning, Jake?" Expecting.... I didn't know what.

"Happy birthday, Mom!" he piped up, the first of many birthday wishes from him today. Most delivered with a big hug and a kiss too.

It was odd not having Ethan around, as well. Though we had celebrated our birthdays last Sunday on camp visiting day -- his a week late, mine a week early -- it was still not quite the same as spending the actual days together.

But the biggest, oddest absence is, of course, my Mother.

This was the first birthday of my life that I didn't see or speak to her, she who has been there since the beginning, she who birthed me. It felt so odd, that sense of "something missing" hanging about me all day. That phantom limb whose faint ghost-pain keeps the bite of absence keen.

"Who else called to wish you Happy Birthday? Dan asked from Chicago when we finally connected to catch up.  "Not my mother" was my immediate reply.  "It just feels so strange to have a birthday without at least a happy birthday call from her."

"Well, it would be stranger if she DID call, wouldn't it?" He shot back, parrying with the gallows humor that those of us with dead parents use to lighten grief's load.

And yes, I laughed. And that was good.

And thus this was neither the best nor worst birthday of my life.  Fun was had. And the melancholy came and went, as it is now wont to do.

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law sent a luscious, glorious floral arrangement that took my breath away (and I then spent the day fending off the cat from devouring it).

Friday night I was taken out to dinner by a small bunch of good girlfriends.  We had a completely lovely evening, full of laughter and talk and wine and good middle-eastern food.  Conversations swirling on, we bounced from movies to kids to husbands to jobs and back around again... getting older, middle school transitions, summer reading lists... travels or lack thereof (one of us confessed to sitting on a park bench and crying whilst reading the Facebook status updates of another of us from Paris, and I could so relate).

Presents came: handmade, floral, yummy, bejeweled, and from Paris.  Many many hugs were given and taken;  my heart light as a breeze, the whole walk home.

And no, my parents never called. Not my Uncle Walter, either.

Never again.

And yes I know it's just the price of growing older, of becoming the eldest generation, as countless families before me have so evolved.

I don't like it.  I don't have to like it.

But it surely beats the alternative.